_______ _ _ _______ __ __ _______ _______ __ _ |______ | | |______ \_/ |_____| |_____| | \ | ______| |_____| | | | | | | | \_|
sf.me > Blog > Forget Your Passwords
Posted on: 9 September 2023
Reading time: 1 minCategory: Technology
If you are trying to remember your passwords, you are doing it wrong. Trying to remember your passwords is absolutely fatal and has numerous disadvantages. To describe the demerits of trying to remember your passwords, here is a cycle that most people follow. You set a password. You forget it. You set a weaker password. And repeat.
Eventually, people have passwords that are not only weak, but they also never change them unless they forget them. This leads to passwords that are short and easy to crack. Worst of all, people continue this habit on sensitive websites like finance or government services.
The solution to this issue? As always, a password manager. You do not have to be an absolute genius to navigate around password managers or use them securely. Memorize a strong password system, not a lone password. Use the password system on your password manager and on accounts where you absolutely know that you will not have access to a password manager.
"What password manager do I use?"
Bitwarden is straightforward and intuitive. It is on the internet so it is less secure than password managers that are completely offline like KeePass. However, it is still much more secure than proprietary password managers like LastPass and NordPass. Everything is free (libre) and open-source software.
KeePass, on the other hand, is much more advanced. It is completely offline, so you need something like Syncthing to sync it to all of your devices. This is my current setup of which you can read here. It is state-of-the-art. I generate 999-character passwords with extended ASCII so my passwords contain symbols like ©æ^ and much more. These passwords have entropies above 10000 bits. For reference, an 81-bit password costs about $1B to crack.
All in all, you should stop remembering your passwords. The human brain is not designed for long-term storage. Let computers that are infinitely better than humans in that regard do the hard work for you.